Patients struggle with remembering which medications to take and when to take them. This is particularly a problem for the elderly or infirm. Additionally, the more severe the medical problem, the more challenging it is to take medications properly. To address this problem various manual devices exist that have multiple compartments that patients (or their care-givers) pre-populate with medications corresponding to various dosing periods. Although this helps reduce errors, the containers are unwieldy and still prone to filling errors.
Automated filling machines have been developed to combine medications into a single pouch or blister that, in turn, are connected to other pouches or containers. Some automated filling machines are capable of filling packages with a variety of different pharmaceuticals or nutraceuticals that are consumed by a patient at the same time. Some patients may have multiple packages or containers that are associated with multiple dosing periods during the day. For example, there may be a group of tablets that are consumed before breakfast in one container, another container may have a group of medications that are to be consumed with lunch, and yet another group of medications that are to be taken before going to bed.
Generally, automated tablet inspection is limited in scope (normally to a single tablet type) and in other cases fail to accurately confirm the proper medication when a multiplicity of medications are placed in a single package or container.
The problem with using most technically and financially viable automated inspection techniques is that the uncertainty percentage is generally unacceptably high, causing a prohibitively expensive and slow manual inspection process to be invoked.
Although it may be seen that packaging multiple medications into containers that hold all medications to be consumed at the same time is a desirable product, large scale implementations have been limited by the lack of a sufficiently reliable and cost-effect way of automatically inspecting filled containers to assure that they are properly filled.
Thus, it would be beneficial to accurately fill containers having a variety of different medications or supplements. Additionally, compliance with a regimen of medication or supplements is challenging for patients having difficulty remembering when a dose has been consumed. The problem is exacerbated by the number of tablets being consumed increasing as the patient ages.